Vivid Dreams

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

Anyone had sleep paralysis? Bloody scary shit.

Awake, can't move, but still sorta dreaming, and you see/hear evil shit.
I've had a ghostly old hag standing over me as well as hellish music accompanied by a demonic child's laughter.

I think I may have had one when I was about 5 years old. I was in bed but I couldn't move and I was looking at my mom who was standing in my doorway walking slowly backwards into the hallway. I was yelling at her but everything came out as whispers. She was holding my yellow plastic baseball bat too for some reason. I think I had that dream twice.

[Shell B]

Anyone had sleep paralysis? Bloody scary shit.

Awake, can't move, but still sorta dreaming, and you see/hear evil shit.
I've had a ghostly old hag standing over me as well as hellish music accompanied by a demonic child's laughter.

Yep. Thankfully, only once. I was in my first apartment and there was a drum kit in the corner that I had stacked up and draped a piece of red fabric over. It was hung from the ceiling and hanging down over the kit. I woke up, sorta, the red fabric looked like it was breathing, I couldn't move and I was absolutely terrified. The hallucinations that often accompany sleep paralysis are actually known as hypnagogia. They can occur with or without the paralysis. I recall reading something about a sleep disorder that wakes you up with a searing pain in your head. You scream, it goes away and you go back to sleep. I can't recall its name.

[Jackalope]

Anyone had sleep paralysis? Bloody scary shit.

Awake, can't move, but still sorta dreaming, and you see/hear evil shit.
I've had a ghostly old hag standing over me as well as hellish music accompanied by a demonic child's laughter.

I've had some lucid dreams, but I found that you can't change the dream too much else you kill it. Mostly it's just, "oh hey I'm dreaming, no wonder I'm able to fly..., ok, I can either wake up or I can let this totally awesome and free 3d/interactive movie continue."

Yes, on a couple of occasions. Yes, it's terrifying.

Aside from some garden variety (yet horrifying) nightmares, I have also had a type where I dream, but the contents of the dreams feel like repressed memories. Imagine waking from a horrifying nightmare, knowing that it was a dream, but being unsure if it was something real from your past or not. Not sure if that explanation makes sense or not.

As to lucid dreams, yeah its happened on a few occasions. The awareness that I'm dreaming usually comes in one of those bizarro WTF moments that can really only happen in a dream.

A weird subtype of lucid dream I have had was a lucid dream within a dream. That is, in your dream, you are dreaming and are aware of the inner dream but not the outer one. That is a bit of a mindfuck.

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I had a lucid dream within a dream once.

The biggest mindfuck for me are the dreams that seem like a sequel to a previous dream but when you wake up you don't remember ever having the original dream in the first place. So it's like your mind implanted a false memory of a past dream just so it could have a sequel.

[Darkstar]

The biggest mindfuck for me are the dreams that seem like a sequel to a previous dream but when you wake up you don't remember ever having the original dream in the first place. So it's like your mind implanted a false memory of a past dream just so it could have a sequel.

Yeah, that's happened to me too! Except I sometimes have actual sequel dreams. For instance, if I wake up multiple times in one night, I might have a continuation of a single dream, dreaming it in segments between waking. Sometimes I also have sequel dreams to dreams I had within the past couple of days, but rarely ever farther back than that. And then there are the times when I dream the same dream multiple times, but get farther into the dream before waking with each go.

I don't dream that often, so by extension the above dream patterns are rare for me, but there were a few times when I had a dream every night for as long as two weeks.

[Jackalope]

The biggest mindfuck for me are the dreams that seem like a sequel to a previous dream but when you wake up you don't remember ever having the original dream in the first place. So it's like your mind implanted a false memory of a past dream just so it could have a sequel.

Yeah, that's happened to me too! Except I sometimes have actual sequel dreams. For instance, if I wake up multiple times in one night, I might have a continuation of a single dream, dreaming it in segments between waking. Sometimes I also have sequel dreams to dreams I had within the past couple of days, but rarely ever farther back than that. And then there are the times when I dream the same dream multiple times, but get farther into the dream before waking with each go.

I don't dream that often, so by extension the above dream patterns are rare for me, but there were a few times when I had a dream every night for as long as two weeks.

I have had those as well, and usually the continuation of the dream occurs the same night, almost never more than a couple of days later. Though there are exceptions - I have had continuation dreams where the prior installment occurred many years ago - in one case over 10 years past.

[Darth]

Dreams where you go through the routine of getting ready for work/school/college...
Only to wake up and realise you gotta do it all again?

[Tea Earl Grey Hot]

I just awoke from a dream in which I denoted a nuke in my house.

[festive1]

I used to have dreams where I would realize I was dreaming, and to a certain extent I could control what happened, but not completely. I've also had repetitive nightmares. In these the setting would change, but the course of events always played out the same. I remember as a kid having this repetitive nightmare, but also being able to control certain aspects of the dream, which made the nightmare part even more terrifying because no matter what I could change or control, the nightmare still happened, and I was never able to escape that part, it was completely inevitable.
The dreams I find particularly weird are what I think of as "serial dreams." Where it's like a movie and when the new dream picks up where the old dream left off. I'm always amazed at the detail and accuracy (in relation to the prior dream/s, even if I don't really recall the dream upon waking).
I don't really like my dreams… They tend to feel like a betrayal of my brain… Things I don't fully understand or events I can't process being forced upon me… At times it's been to the point of waking up from a nightmare, only to have flashbacks of the same event, so there's no escaping, if I'm asleep or awake I've had bouts of insomnia from trying to avoid disturbing dreams.

[Cyberman]

I've had lucid dreams a few times, in fact I've been trying to induce them for quite some time now with little success. It seems that they are more likely if you relax completely with no body movement whatsoever, until your brain thinks you're asleep and starts dreaming. The trickiest parts are recognising when you are dreaming and then maintaining that level of lucidity without the shock of realisation waking you up. The first part involves testing the reality of your surroundings; if you can establish some sort of routine in which you do a reality check after a certain trigger, say switching on a light, then if you encounter that trigger in your dream and you don't get the expected result, you're probably dreaming (electrical devices such as lights tend not to work in dreams). I've gone lucid after trying to pull some plastic wrapped item from a power cable which was threaded impossibly through one of those punched holes that shops use to hang them from display hooks; then realising how impossible the scenario was, I immediately ran to switch on the light and couldn't. I was so excited at having achieved lucidity that I immediately woke up, which could have been avoided by, of all things, spinning around in the dream (I've tried this, it does work). Trying to do something excessively improbable, such as flying, before your lucid state is fully established will also kill it.